Before Installing

Before you can begin installing YaBB, there are a few basic things you must know: CHMOD (file permissions), FTP client usage, and uploading files in ASCII and binary mode. While not required, it would also be useful to have a basic understanding of Perl and HTML.

Requirements

The first thing you need is a website host that supports Perl 5.8+, has a minimum of 15mb+ free disk space on your web hosting account, an e-mail server(such as SMTP) or sendmail. Free and extremely low cost hosts frequently do not have these features or place severe restrictions on hosting forum software. For a list of hosts that do, check the YaBB Chat and Support Community. Most hosts' FAQ pages will say if they do or do not.

So now that you've got a host, you'll need to get an FTP client. FTP clients allow you to connect to the FTP server that your host provides. Through the FTP server, you will install YaBB. For Windows users, we recommend the free, open source FileZilla or WS_FTP. For a comparison list of FTP clients, please view this Wikipedia article or similar sites to download a client for your system. Now that you have an FTP client, familiarize yourself with ASCII and Binary transfer modes.

The only thing left to learn about is file permissions, or CHMOD. CHMOD (CHange MODe) is a process that only Unix, Linux, and other *nix web hosts support; if your host does not say that it's a Windows host, then it's probably one of these. This sets permissions on files. These permissions include reading, writing, and executing. You use your FTP client to CHMOD, and how you do so in every client is slightly different. In many of them, all you have to do is right-click on a file, select "CHMOD" or "Set File Permissions," and then input the CHMOD number or choose the proper check boxes. Simple.

Verify that you have the following: FTP client, web hosting account, a text editor, and a web browser.

Please Note: The spell checker included in YaBB 2.5.2 release is hosted on external websites belonging to Google (googiespell). You must take into consideration firewall settings and content blockers in using this feature. If any setting restricts the free access to the necessary external websites, this feature will not work. Also, businesses and organizations may have network policies that restrict access to Google or its websites (to prevent employees websurfing), so enabling the spell check feature could inadvertently cause a violation of the company's/organization's network policy if that is not considered. The spell check feature is a selectable option and can be enabled or disabled in the forum's Admin Center.